Question the CIA's activities

[mk1]To the Editor:

Several letters to the Friday Tech indicate that further
explanation of the student protests against the CIA are necessary.

In particular, Paul Sherer '87 ["Survival is only determined by might and
not by right," Oct. 18] tells us that we should support the actions of the
actions of the CIA, because "survival is determined by might, not right,"
and that "America stands for democracy and human rights." I suppose this
means that we somehow symbolize these ideals while actively destroying them
in tiny Third World countries whose absorption into the monolith of world
communism will bring about the demise of our vulnerable republic.

Only the ignorance of the American public has allowed this convenient
government claim to remain largely accepted. Only the violence on the scale
of the Vietnam War seems capable of breaking through this wall of
ignorance. Here are some examples of how the CIA has protected us from the
Soviet Union:

Very few Americans are aware that in 1954, after eight years of
democratic rule, the government claim of Guatemala was overthrown by the
CIA and local fascists. Our government didn't like the left-leaning
tendencies of the president of this small Central-American country, but
Guatemala's real sin was expropriating the "unprofitable" land that United
Fruit Company was keeping in reserve at a time when thousands of
Guatemalans were starving. The government could put up virtually no armed
resistance because they had virtually no external (ie. Soviet) support. The
legacy of our intervention has been thirty years of military rule that has
murdered at least seventy-thousand civilians -- and the people are still
malnourished.

Chile's threat to the United States was its demonstration that a
socialist president could legitimately be elected president. Kissinger was
particularly worried that European countries such as Italy might be so
impressed by Chile's example thay they, too, would succumb to this threat
of democracy. The only choice was to use the CIA to secretly do all it
could to destabilize the country. When the military finally struck, with
tacit US approval, it replaced decades of parliamentary democracy with a
totalitarian military dicatorship that whithered the freedom and respect
for human rights that persisted under the Socialists.

To complete this sampler of CIA activities (only a fraction of their many
tricks around the world), we come to Nicaragua. In 1979, where were the
"freedom fighters" the CIA brought together in 1982 to attack their own
country from bases in Honduras? They were in the National Guard, protecting
Somoza from just about everybody else in the country. Why use Guardsmen, so
widely hated in Nicaragua, to attack the regime? According to CIA
testimony, they were "the only ones who wanted to fight" [The Washington
Post, 5/8/83].

That groups such as the Political Science Committee on Central America
seek to educate the American public about the crimes that are being
committed in our name does not mean we are in favor of similar Soviet
actions. On the contrary, we must always fight this assumption that every
place on earth must be owned by one of the two superpowers. Until the KGB
begin to recruit on campus or MIT students tell me that the Russions must
fight US imperialism in Poland, it seems more relevant to try to influence
the actions of our own government. For forty years the Soviet Union and the
United States have used each other as excuses to control smaller countries
(though five years before the Russian Revolution were invading Nicaragua to
protect it from "Mexican Bolshevism"). In reality actions such as those I
have described have little to do with a Soviet threat per se, but
with an erosion of US influence in countries which wish to assert their own
sovereignty.

The people of Central America are not pawns to be moved around by the big
countries. They are people with enough problems without the United States
screaming at them about the Russian threat when with our moeny and guns and
our bombs we are their main threat. I invite everyone to future Committee
on Central America events -- lectures, movies, debates, etc. Come to
listen, to argue. But do not out of ignorance condone the suffering our
government is causing just because it waves the flag. In a society that
prides itself on being ruled by the people, that would be irresponsible --
and dangerous.